Comments Are Inevitable

By Tom Moertel Posted on August 14, 2026 Tags: code, comments, beyond clean code, clean code, good code, nature of code, purpose of code, source code, definitions, theory, philosophy, engineering culture One of the arguments floated in the book Clean Code is that “if our programming languages were expressive enough, or if we had the talent to subtly wield those languages to express our intent, we would not need comments very much—perhaps not at all.” In other words, comments are needed because at least one of two conditions is true: We programmers lack the talent to express our intent without using comments. (We have failed.) We programmers lack the means to express our intent without using comments. (The designers of our programming languages have failed.) In my earlier post on the subject, I argued that the first condition is false. My argument was simple: The humans reading our code need to know not only what our code does but why it does what it does and why we chose to implement…